1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a computer program product, system, and method for using queues corresponding to attribute values and priorities associated with units of work and sub-units of the unit of work to select the units of work and their sub-units to process.
2. Description of the Related Art
To perform work in a workload management environment, the workload manager may queue units of work in a work queue and then select the units of work from the queue to process. A workload process may search through the queued data to find a “best candidate” to process, using an algorithm to provide the required fairness. One drawback of this type of “best candidate” selection process is that it requires searching through large amounts of queued data looking for the “best candidate”. Another aged selection criteria that may be used in conjunction with best candidate algorithm selects queued data that has been on the queue for an excessive duration. The combination of these two algorithms independently working on the queue may yield unpredictable selection results.
When processing a volume to transfer having extents spread across ranks of disks in a Redundant Array of Independent Disk (RAID) configuration, the volume may be divided into parts to process and the parts may be processed according to their RAID rank. In certain implementations, there may be part agents to process different parts of the volume, and each part agent would process tracks in a RAID rank assigned to that part process.
There is a need in the art for improved techniques for queuing units of work to process.